Wrapping up Employee Learning Week(s)

This year I had an ambitious goal at PLCMC. To celebrate Employee Learning Week I wanted to start with the basics of learning…learning styles. In my email to staff announcing ELW I included a link to a survey I created which would administer Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory.

Over 200 staff completed the survey–about a third of our employees, and even though I had macros and mail merges set up to make tabulating the results easy it still took a while to create individual reports for each of the 211 employees who completed the survey.

Here is a copy of the email I sent out wrapping up the survey.

Curious how PLCMC employees learn?

As part of Employee Learning Week, over 200 PLCMC staff completed a Learning Styles Inventory.

The results are in!

When you look at the dominant learning style for those who took the survey:

35% have a dominant learning style of Applier (Finding the practical application of ideas.)

29% have a dominant learning style of Actor (Action and getting things done.

27% have a dominant learning style of Thinker (Creating concepts and models.)

9% have a dominant learning style of Innovator (Offering ideas, alternatives and examples.)

This breakdown is illustrated in the following pie chart:

The bigger picture – we’re fairly balanced at PLCMC.

Although our indivudual learning styles vary, when you look at PLCMC as a whole, our preferences for learning are very balanced. Many staff were dominant in several areas and one person was completely balanced with 25% in each quadrant.If you total all of the submissions and plot the results as one unit, our overall learning style looks like this:

What can I do with this information?

As individuals, we each have our own unique learning styles and preferences. Each of the people you work with has a unique learning style as well. When we combine that diversity among our employees great things can happen. The key is to remember that not everyone learns the same way. Simply by being aware of our similarities and differences, we can make an effort to reach out to those who are different from ourselves.

Lori Reed, coauthor of Workplace Learning & Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Non-Profit Trainers, is a learning and communication strategist with more than twenty years experience in learning and development. A 2009 Library Journal Mover & Shaker and a 2010 "One to Watch" for paralibrarians, Lori graduated cum laude from East Carolina University with a Bachelor of Science in Communication. Lori is a certified Synchronous Learning Expert and a North Carolina Master Trainer and has traveled across North America speaking about libraries and training.